GIScience Education from Faculty Careers to Student Training: A Dual Perspective on Academic and Professional Development

Abstract

This thesis examines the educational and institutional state of Geographic Information Science (GIScience) through two complementary components: global faculty hiring patterns and the structure of U.S.-based professional master’s programs. The first part analyzes global GIS faculty mobility, focusing on the institutions where faculty earned their PhDs and where they currently teach. Network analysis and diversity indices are applied to identify dominant academic pathways, regional hiring patterns, and thematic clusters in research focus. The findings uncover potential inequalities in faculty production, regional imbalances, and the centralization of intellectual influence within a small subset of institutions. The second part examines GIS professional programs in the United States. Drawing on IPEDS institutional data and program websites, this study identified 183 GIS-related programs in the United States, examined enrollment statistics, and narrowed the focus to 58 professional GIS programs. Text similarity analysis was conducted to compare 530 course descriptions against the GIS&T Body of Knowledge (BoK). This method enables a systematic evaluation of how well professional program content aligns with core competencies in GIScience, revealing both prevalent areas of emphasis and underrepresented topics. Additionally, twelve semi-structured interviews with program directors supplement the quantitative findings by contextualizing faculty composition, curriculum design, financial models, and industry alignment.

This study offers a novel methodological framework for understanding the development of GIScience from both academic and professional training perspectives. The combination of large-scale quantitative analysis and qualitative inquiry contributes to a more detailed understanding of how GIScience education is shaped, practiced, and institutionalized across multiple levels. It seeks to inform scholarly conversations on spatial knowledge production, educational equity, and the evolving role of geospatial professions. As GIScience continues to expand both in scope and scale, understanding its educational infrastructures becomes essential not only for pedagogy but for the vitality of the discipline itself